The next night we holed up.
I camped out in the bed on the main floor and ate sugar bombs by the fistful right out of the box and he paced, shotgun in hand, because that's just what Charon does.

But today his armor was only half on and from time to time he looked at me in a way that made me feel like I was burning from within like a glowing one after I poked it with my Shiskebab.

Fwoom!

That night we both slept upstairs in the narrow bed again.
It's almost as if we preferred to be denied the choice of putting any space between us and it was the bed that decided I had to sleep practically on top of him, not us.

That morning, he was presumably asleep and I really wasn't awake when my hand fell against something that I could have mistaken for granite if it wasn't as hot as the bomb in Megaton.
I was still asleep when I just happened to roll onto my back and he just happened to roll on top of me wrapping his arms underneath me and breathing hotly into my ear that he wanted to fuck me. Presumably still in his sleep, he just happened to impale me like a squirrel on a stick and I just happened to let him because at this point I doubt he would or could've listened even if I had ordered him to stop.
There were no more bluffs to be called and the whole ownership thing had become more stumped than the sex of a super mutant. Not that I know anything about that kind of thing.

Every time I tried to get out of bed he either held me firm or followed me only to take me down despite my half-assed giggly attempts to "escape". When I actually did manage to squirm away, he used the table I was storing my jet on as target practice. It was painful to watch all that shit go up in a spray of wood and inhaler bits but there wasn't much that could be done about it after the fact.
When I opened my mouth to say something he just pulled me onto him and I forgot what I was going to say. A deep sense of calmness began to take root in me. Time was still distorted but most everything else started to make sense.

Mental and emotional revelations aside, my body was beginning to feel like a giant bruise so I was sort of glad when he inexplicably jumped out of bed to go take apart, clean and reassemble his gun two times in a row. He put his armor through a lengthy maintenance session and suited up
and I took the hint and did the same.
Except for the doing my gun two times thing. That was his neurosis not mine.

I grabbed all we could carry and began our treck to Rivet City to meet my Dad because it just seemed like the logical thing to do at the time. When we arrived in the evening. I visited the Doc and paid him to give me a shot of something that felt 10 times worse than the withdrawal itself He told me to "stay straight" as I lurched out of his room but not before I told him to "get bent."

Before we turned in for the night Charon requested a few minutes to "take care of something."
We met back up after he "took care of it" and bought a room at the Weatherly.
Turns out he slit the throat of a guy named "Sister" that night, don't ask me why. I don't know now and I"ll probably never know.

When we emerged from the room the next afternoon Ms. Weatherly and 2 other woman were talking in hushed, rushed tones at the front desk and they clammed right up when they saw me but not before I heard one of them whispering too loudly.

"It's not her bodyguard, they were sharing a bed. I heard everything!"

First of all, fuck.
You'd think that a ship made of steel would have better sound proofing.
But I'd hedge my bets on one of the bitches mashing their ear up against the wall or something.
Either way they knew that I wasn't making Charon sleep on the floor and that wasn't construction we were doing in the room last night.

I put my caps on the table with a saccharine smile.

"Hey...there's an extra 10 caps in there because we destroyed your sheets. Have fun with that."

I bit my lip to prevent myself from exploding into laughter as I turned my back and reunited with my not bodyguard in the hall. When we walked by I waved at them and sent them squawking to the extent that I could still hear them as we descended down the stairs towards the lab even over Galaxy Radio.
People like them would probably love living in a vault so they could rot in the stagnation of their own preconceptions in a habitat as closed and narrow as their minds.
I felt queasy thinking of all the years I spent in the vault. I thought about how much I'd seen in the short time I'd been out and I felt inconsolable when I thought of all the years I had been cheated out of living.